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Turtle Bay, in the East 40s and 50s from Park Avenue east to the East River, likely takes its name from a Dutch term meaning “bent blade,” probably referencing the shape of the shoreline. It is somewhat hard to believe it now, but along the waterfront slaughterhouses had to be razed in the 1940s to […]

Remembering once again that I don’t do enough Bronx posts, I set off on one of the most brain-meltingly humid days of the summer to parade around the near geographical center of the Bronx, Crotona Park, Mount Eden and High Bridge. Crotona Park, the neighborhood and the park, is nowhere near the Croton Aqueduct, which […]

I was on my way to a gathering in Caton Park recently when, noticing I had not been able to walk all that much during the week, decided to walk from the IND 7th Avenue station, a route that would take me through Park Slope south of 9th Avenue and then into Windsor Terrace. I’ve […]

Edgar Allan Poe was a man about town in New York in the 1840s: he lived in several different locales, and while during his Bronx tenure he wasn’t officially a New Yorker since Fordham wasn’t a part of NYC until 1874, we’ll overlook that technicality. Poe was born in Boston and lived in Providence, Baltimore, […]

Continued from Part 2 In May 2016 I decided to walk up Pearl Street’s entire length from Battery Park to Tribeca. It’s an oddly positioned street, as far as downtown goes, first running northeast, then gradually turning northerly and even westerly. Its entire length once ran to Broadway and Thomas Street, though it has been […]

As I’m sure you’re aware, those attempting to post Comments to a page receive a “page not found” notice. The problem has proven to be a hard nut to crack, as I had to update to the latest WordPress version as part of the repairs for being hacked in May. Unfortunately I haven’t been able […]

In the fall of 2015 I realized that it had been a full decade since I had been to Travis, which is about as far west as you can get in Staten Island (there are locales further southwest, like Tottenville and its satellite neighborhoods which are as far south in New York State as you […]

Concord Street is one of those east-west Brooklyn streets that can’t be neatly fitted into a neighborhood. It’s too far east to be in Brooklyn Heights, too far south to be in DUMBO, too far west to be in Fort Greene, and too far north, really, to be part of Downtown the way, say, Fulton […]

Here’a an unusual Type G wall-mounted shaft at 41 Wooster Street north of Grand. It’s the only NEMA luminaire in public use, though I’m not sure if the Department of Transportation services it. When I shot it a few years ago it had a day burning Mercury vapor bulb and when the Google Street View […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 I walked West Street in Greenpointin September 2015, and it may have been a propitious time to do so because the west end of Greenpoint is, by many accounts, about to see a lot of changes as money move$ in and the waterfront, previously given over to unloading and importing goods […]

By SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY correspondent This piece originally appeared in FNY in April 2010, but was never transcribed when I switched to the WordPress platform the following year. Sergey updated the article in February 2015. The Rockaway Peninsula of Queens never disappoints an urban explorer. Physically separated from the rest of New York City by […]

By SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY correspondent Stockholm Street isn’t the only yellow-bricked road in Queens — a short stretch of Foothill Avenue at 193rd Street in Jamaica Estates boasts bricks, as well. There are also a couple of red-bricked roads in Jamaica, as well. Further east, Foothill Avenue encounters a loop formed by […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 GOOGLE MAP: PRINCE’S BAY One of the places I visited in 2005, and have only been in once or twice since, is Prince’s Bay, on the south shore of the island about 3/4 distance to the end of Staten Island and the southernmost place in New York State in Tottenville, Ward’s […]

In February 2005 I was a Staten Islander for a week! I may have told this story before in one of my Staten Island pages, but I like telling it. At the time I was still hard at work at what has proven so far to be the signature achievement of my life, the publication […]

BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributorThe “forgotten” appendage of the city, the Rockaway peninsula has a number of communities strung together by an elevated subway: Far Rockaway, Wavecrest, Edgemere, Holland, Seaside, and Rockaway Park. Among the smaller neighborhoods, Hammels lacks its own el station, sandwiched between a revitalized Arverne and a resilient Holland. Not much […]

BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten New York correspondent On the map of Manhattan, the first decade of the new millennium has given the island a new set of streets, with seemingly identical-looking and astronomically priced residential towers built atop a former rail yard. Located north of Hell’s Kitchen and south of Riverside Park, not exactly the Upper […]

When I last did a general walkabout in Woodhaven, it was all the way back in 2007, so there’s a little catching up to do. One of the more successful Forgotten NY tours was in this very neighborhood in June 2015, so I’ll use some of the notes from that day for this survey. I’ll […]

Continued from Part 1 I decided to take my latest voyage of discovery in Flushing in October 2015, when its intrinsic oderifousness is tamped down just a little. My idea started when I did an item on an obscure lane, Birds Alley, that ceased to be a mapped street decades ago, but its path is preserved […]

Downtown Flushing is noisy, overcrowded, and smells horrible. That’s why, naturally, I decided to take my latest voyage of discovery in Flushing in October, when the oderifousness is tamped down just a little. My idea started when I did an item on an obscure lane, Birds Alley, that ceased to be a mapped street decades […]

Dominie’s Hoek (Hook), originally the western end of the town of Newtown, was originally settled when a tract of land was awarded to Everard Bogardus, a Dutch Reformed minister (dominie), in 1643. The land was later owned by British sea captain George Hunter and by 1825 had become known as Hunter’s Point. It began the […]

By Sean Colby and Kevin Walsh Boston Gas (Light) Company was founded in 1822. Over the years other gas companies were established around Boston as well, but in 1905 many merged, and the Boston Consolidated Gas Company formed. Boston Consolidated Gas became Boston Gas in 1955. Boston Gas eventually became a part of Eastern Enterprises, […]

By SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY correspondent In recent years, the coastlines of Manhattan and Brooklyn have been reclaimed by the public as ribbons of waterfront parkland take up shores that previously belonged to industry. As we reported previously in College Point and North Astoria, Queens’ East River Shoreline is not as accessible. Here, residential developers […]

Continued from Part 1 There are still some parts of Manhattan I haven’t been in with regularity since I began photographing this website in 1998, and the area in the West 140s from St. Nicholas Avenue west to Riverside Drive has been one of those. Funny because I’ve spent a lot of time in the […]

There are still some parts of Manhattan I haven’t been in with regularity since I began photographing this website in 1998, and the area in the West 140s from St. Nicholas Avenue west to Riverside Drive has been one of those. Funny because I’ve spent a lot of time in the City College area, to […]

John Bunny was an early 20th Century comic actor and theatre impresario and appeared in over 100 silents in a little over five years, including a filmed version of Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo” (1911) and Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” (1913). Bunny’s exuberant style and 300-lb. girth made him a fan favorite; he was so well-known […]

I first became aware of Kew Gardens’ winding streets when I was on jury duty — the year must have been in the late 1990s. You can be called to three different courthouses in Queens, and this time I was assigned to the Queens County Courthouse on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens. As is my […]

I have visited Greenpoint a great deal for FNY pages, and have conducted two FNY tours in the Garden Spot of Brooklyn over 15 years. My last major survey, though, happened in 2005, almost 10 years ago! There have been plenty of other pages devoted to Eckford, Milton and Noble Streets and the shop signage […]

I have visited Greenpoint a great deal for FNY pages, and have conducted two FNY tours in the Garden Spot of Brooklyn over 15 years. My last major survey, though, happened in 2005, almost 10 years ago! There have been plenty of other pages devoted to Eckford, Milton and Noble Streets and the shop signage […]

I have visited Greenpoint a great deal for FNY pages, and have conducted two FNY tours in the Garden Spot of Brooklyn over 15 years. My last major survey, though, happened in 2005, almost 10 years ago! There have been plenty of other pages devoted to Eckford, Milton and Noble Streets and the shop signage […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Astoria…Ditmars Boulevard…the subway roll signs on the R train advertised these outlandish, far-off locales when I boarded it in Bay Ridge when I lived there for the better part of three decades, but I never really thought to trouble this northwest section of Queens, except for the occasional bicycle ride through, […]

Astoria…Ditmars Boulevard…the subway roll signs on the R train advertised these outlandish, far-off locales when I boarded it in Bay Ridge when I lived there for the better part of three decades, but I never really thought to trouble this northwest section of Queens, except for the occasional bicycle ride through, until I actually moved […]

PART ONE | PART TWO Having staggered through Greenwich Village, SoHo and the Lower East Side, I left off this extravaganza at Clinton and Houston Streets, where Clinton Street continues north as Avenue B. I’m always reminded of Larry Kirwan when on Avenue B, not from his stint in Black 47, but from this, a […]

Visiting Staten Island, of course, is a provocative act. I’ll paraphrase the opening line to my introduction to the ForgottenBook and say that if you’re a New Yorker not from Staten Island, you’re not supposed to visit Staten Island, you’re not supposed to care what goes on there at all, you’re committing a subversive act […]

I return to Port Richmond frequently — it’s New York City’s version of one of those innumerable small towns around the country whose downtowns have been Wal-Marted to death, as described in James Kunstler‘s sociological-urban studies books such as The Geography of Nowhere. Port Richmond, once the crown jewel of Staten Island’s industrial North Shore, […]

After covering northwest Queens in Part One, I’ll move on to northeast and central Queens in Part 2. After 35 years as a Brooklynite, more specifically a Bay Ridger, a job location prompted a move to Flushing in 1993 and then east to Little Neck in 2007. During those years, Flushing has continued to ascend […]

Queens is so vast that I have already decided that it’s going to take at least two parts to get through it, and I may need even three. It has been a county since 1683 (just as the USA originally had 13 states, the state of New York has 12 original counties: Albany, Cornwall, Dukes, Dutchess, […]

As seen in Part One, among the odder things, at least to me, about the names of the neighborhoods of Manhattan is that so many of them are named prosaically. Many neighborhoods do not honor prominent personages, or name check prominent landmarks or geographical features. The central part of the island below Central Park is […]

While other parts of town are touted as featuring the twin virtues “vibrant” and “diverse,” Bay Ridge features flags from the world over along its streets, mounted on head-high flagpoles on main and side streets. This is a tradition that goes back decades, as I remember them appearing as early as the 1960s. The Moroccan […]

I come today in the Names of the Neighborhoods series to a place considered the center of the universe… ask any Manhattanite. There are Manhattanites that will only grudgingly travel to any other of the four boroughs, considering them déclassé. Lynn Samuels, the late talk show hostess, once declared that she had never left Manhattan. […]

Brooklyn, the borough, was once a city on its own until it narrowly voted to consolidate with New York City in 1898. The city evolved out of six distinct towns in Kings County, most developed during the Dutch colonial period: Brooklyn, Bushwick, New Utrecht, Gravesend, Flatbush, and Flatlands. Later, this became two cities and six […]

This is the first of a series of five in which I try to explicate as best I can the names of the neighborhoods of each borough. Some of them are easily inferrable, while some of them have to be ferreted out, Holmes-like. Tackling the Bronx first, the only mainland borough… The Riverdale Memorial […]

This all got started with a screen capture from Forgotten NY correspondent Sergey Kadinsky, who sent me a photo of a strangely-named Queens street and asked me if I knew where it was. Of course I knew, but it was a neighborhood I hadn’t been in for over a dozen years, the one just across […]

So my new machine, made in Dec 2013, has been installed and is up and running. Of course, like cars, computers are outdated the moment you turn them on. All my stuff prior to September 2013 was saved by the Mac Time Machine onto an external disk. Of course, that means a year’s worth was […]

I’ll likely obtain a new machine this week, and I’ve salvaged photos through the end of 2012 (which unfortunately leaves out what I’ve shot this year), so hopefully postings will resume soon, once the new computer is installed and everything configured. 12/3/13

My hard drive died, I have to use my old machine, which has an old version of safari which doesn’t allow access to several sites, and my most recent photos are stuck on the diabled hard drive. So, into the shop it goes, where hopefully they can be rescued. This is the second time this […]

Hamilton Park, a section of New Brighton, Staten Island, is one of the city’s most unsung areas featuring breathtaking architecture. With the leaves falling, I’ll soon visit again to take photos of area treasures. One of three officially landmarked buildings in Hamilton Park (along with Christ Church and the Pritchard House, 66 Harvard Avenue) this […]

Last summer (2012 I’m talking about), there was a day that was somewhat lessened of the stultifying heat and paralyzing humidity, and I made straight for Port Morris, the Bronx, where I had never been. ( I always try to walk at least one street per week where I have never been.) This strictly industrial […]

I haven’t paid as much attention to Brooklyn Heights over the years as I have to its neighbors, DUMBO and Cobble Hill. I hope to make up for it in the upcoming months, as the shooting here is best in the winter months when the architecture can be seen through bare trees. Brooklyn Heights, which […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 WAYFARING: Red Hook Louis Valentino Park and Pier are named for a hero fireman who spent his early years in Red Hook and Carroll Gardens. Valentino gave his life while searching for three injured firefighters in a Flatlands garage fire on February 5, 1996. The park is surrounded by ancient warehouse […]

I have been in Red Hook before … Transoms of Red Hook, July 2004 Coffey and a Donut, October 2008 Silent Hook, June 2012 and plenty more, plus a ForgottenTour in the pouring rain in May 2003, which included visits to Sunny’s Bar and what was then the Liberty Heights Tap Room … … and […]

It was the hottest day of the year so far, and I spent it in Far Rockaway. The plan was simple. The day after the Hurricane Sandy-ravaged A train trestle was restored to service across Jamaica Bay, I would take it to its further reaches at the very end of Queens, the eastern end of […]

Actually this walk features rather less wilderness than when I first did it in 1999. After reading Bruce Kershner’s Secret Places of Staten Island, a primer for the remaining wild areas all over the island, I sallied forth on several of the adventures written about in the book. One of the more fascinating ones was […]

Though this was the first time in awhile, while writing Forgotten New York the past 15 years I have frequently found myself in Westchester Square in the Bronx. The neighborhood surrounds the triangle caused by the confluence of two major roads, Westchester Avenue and East Tremont Avenue at Westchester Creek, which here is buried underground […]

Prepare to gape in awe when walking any street between Albemarle and Beverley Roads and Stratford Road and East 19th Street. You’ll find huge Victorian mansions of every conceivable size, color and style in these streets. This is no mere accident: one region, known as Prospect Park South, was developed by Syracusan Dean Alvord, who purchased […]

The name “William Trist Bailey” will probably engender not a whiff of recognition by all except true Queens historians these days, but you have him to thank for the far-off (by NYC standards) town of Bayswater, located northwest of downtown Far Rockaway. Bayswater was laid out around 1878 by Bailey, who built homes and a […]

In Janaury 2012 I was scrabbling around Uptown Trinity Cemetery and its adjacent neighborhood, Sugar Hill, so named because it represented the “sweet” life to aspiring African-Americans who lived uptown, aspired to Sugar Hill’s then-luxury buildings and spacious apartments, and were then inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, a literary, philosophical and musical movement of the […]

In August 2012 I walked a convoluted route from the West 233rd Street station on the #2 elevated northwest, east and northwest again through Woodlawn Heights (or is it Woodlawn? I call the cemetery Woodlawn) southern Yonkers and northern Riverdale, one of the pleasanter walks in town–to a point, which I will explain later. The […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 After leaving the 1836 Latourette House, which now serves as the clubhouse for the Latourette Park Golf Course, I wanted to make my way down to Richmondtown and then, the S74 bus back to the ferry. I had to steady myself, since this was by far the most dangerous part of […]

It had been quite awhile sine I had taken a long ramble in the Fifth Borough, apart from some wanderings from the ferry along Kill Van Kull to Snug Harbor, so I took a few hours in July 2012 to travel from Oakwood Heights through Lighthouse Hill and around again to Richmondtown, a location almost […]

Besides pawing with ever-increasing futility amongst the dregs of the online listings and interviewing with firms located for me by an agency, with briefly elevated and later inevitably dashed hopes, I have been continuing to write new pages of this site while updating the old, as well as lurching around various neighborhoods, attempting to remain […]

I’m in Red Hook about once every 4 years or so. When I lived in Bay Ridge I would sometimes bicycle in, but not that often, because it was ringed by a nearly impenetrable barrier of slums, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance. Red Hook, known as South Brooklyn when, in the 1800s, […]

Though College Point, in northern Queens east of LaGuardia Airport and bordering the East and Flushing Rivers, is served by four bus lines, it’s considered one of Queens’ out-of-the-way outposts, since it’s severed from the rest of the borough by the old Flushing Airport site and the Whitestone Expressway. Only three main roads lead there: […]

In late winter 2012 I was wandering around downtown Brooklyn, on Fulton, Duffield, and Livingston Streets. Fulton has undergone a change lately, as the venerable Fulton Mall, instituted in 1979, has undergone a remake with curved, Dystopian-looking light poles and updated signage and shelters. It had been frozen in time for about 30 years. The […]

I set out to walk from the Astoria Boulevard BMT elevated station to the Mount Vernon “Hotel” in Lenox Hill on October 30, 2011, a bright fall day that was the first day following NY’s heaviest snowstorm of the winter, as it has likely turned out. On October 29th, parts of the city got 6 […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Today’s featured walk sent me from Bay Ridge after a dental appointment southeast and east through Sunset Park and Borough Park at the border of Kensington. Well-worn territory for me, and suffused with familiarity and memories…since I was born, raised and spent my first 35 years there. Still, I can always […]

Today’s featured walk sent me from Bay Ridge after a dental appointment southeast and east through Sunset Park and Borough Park at the border of Kensington. Well-worn territory for me, and suffused with familiarity and memories…since I was born, raised and spent my first 35 years there. Still, I can always find some little-trodden ground […]

Broadway crosses 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues south of Central Park, but the crossing with 7th Avenue is so gradual (I don’t know where to find this out, but it must be at an angle of less than 20 degrees) that there’s about a 4-block stretch when the avenues merge and become one wide […]

Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan south of Central Park: Madison, Union, Stuyvesant, Tompkins, and Washington. (Yes I know I have left out Bryant Park and Greeley and Herald Squares, which I’ll get […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Steinway Mansion William Steinway’s mansion, on 41st Street, still stands on a high hill that has never been leveled, unlike the surrounding area. 41st Street still looks like a country lane. 41st Street, looking north from 19th Avenue, is totally nondescript — there are a couple of manufacturers and some storage […]

After chronicling Columbus Square at the Astoria Boulevard station on the Ditmars Boulevard Astoria el I found myself with a couple of spare hours on a brilliant August afternoon. Actually I had all the time in the world, as I was unemployed at the time. I never fully take advantage of a bad situation; when […]

I’m quite familiar with Canarsie and Flatlands — these neighborhoods in southeast Brooklyn were quite accessible to the Bay Ridge boy just by bicycling east a few miles, which I did readily in my years before moving to Queens in 1992. While these neighborhoods look essentially the same as they did in the 1970s and […]

Lawns in Manhattan? Homes with porches? That only happens, as a rule, in Marble Hill, the only section of Manhattan located on mainland USA — because of a massive engineering project that was finished nearly a century ago. Even though Marble Hill is politically affiliated with Manhattan, geographically and “spiritually” it’s Bronx all the way, […]

Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Forgotten New York Walks, a new FNY category and the first since FNY Slices was instituted in July 2007. Walks will feature what the title indicates, a walk from one neighborhood to the other — especially when the two neighborhoods are completely disparate. In 2007 I […]

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn until age 35 and took a lot of bus rides to surrounding neighborhoods, with parents and then, after turning 17, without. (Just kidding. I was biking around the borough as early as age 10). One of the favored routes was the B16, which went from Shore Road to Prospect […]

If you have never heard of Finn Square, that’s perfectly understandable. In NYC parlance, a “square” can be any shape, and Finn Square is a triangle in Tribeca formed by the intersection of West Broadway and Varick and Franklin Streets. Officially, there’s no actual neighborhood called Finn Square, but in my opinion there’s enough distinctive […]

I have done two previous surveys of Rosebank, a small town on the southeast edge of Staten Island bordered by the SIRT cut, the Verrazano Bridge approach, and the Staten Island Expressway. I have always enjoyed its collection of tiny streets that go nowhere, punctuated by lengthier roads like Hylan Boulevard and Bay Street that […]

The latest ForgottenTour, 47th in a series that goes back to June 1, 1999, met at 10:30AM on Saturday, August 13th in Hunters Point, narrated by your webmaster and the Greater Astoria Historical Society‘s Rich Melnick. It was the most successful ForgottenTour of the 2011 season to date as over 40 ForgottenFans signed on for 3 hours […]

Why was this ForgottenTour different from most other ForgottenTours? Unlike eight of the previous nine tours this one did not feature clouds, rain or rumors of rain, and thus was considerably funner than Tour 45 in Riverdale/Spuyten Duyvil, after which everyone was thoroughly soaked through, and Tour 43 on Skillman Avenue in Sunnyside, after which we entered Donovans of Woodside […]

As many have guessed, I walk on the periphery in many arenas. In the spring and summer of 2010 and 2011, I maintained an ongoing survey of the Queens-Nassau line and, as mentioned on the Part 1 Little Neck page, today’s Queens-Nassau line was originally in mid-Queens and was originally a town line that was […]

Riverdale is nestled along the Hudson River between Spuyten Duyvil on the south, Yonkers in the north and Van Cortlandt Park on the east. With its curving, quiet lanes, spectacular views of the New Jersey Palisades and spectacular estates, it seems to be more a part of suburban Westchester. The New York Times real estate section […]

Over the course of six years I wound up taking two different batches of photos on 2nd Avenue between Houston Street and 34th. Like the Bowery, which it (sort of) parallels for a few blocks, it is now the theater for a new round of gentrification that promises to erase some of its unique quality. […]

Saturday, May 14th, 2011 was the second in Forgotten New York’s new Second Saturdays Series in association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a more ambitious tours program in the past, as tours are planned for the second Saturday of each month in 2011 through November. No locale will be left uninvaded as FNY continues to seek […]

When I moved to Flushing, Queens in 1993 I was amazed to find how wide open it all was, once you got away from the super-crowded downtown Main Street area. The avenues were super-wide, the houses were small and had big lawns, and things were generally a great deal more suburban, not in the quaint […]

Saturday, April 16th marked the first tour of the semi-ambitious FNY Second Saturdays tour events in which Forgotten New York, in association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, will present one tour per month — all over town, not just in Astoria — on the second Saturday of each month through October. (Yes, April 16th was the […]

I did a thorough survey of Staten Island’s Tompkinsville and Stapleton, especially Van Duzer Street, in December 2010 (to match my earlier page on the gorgeous homes of St. Paul’s Avenue). I wasn’t finished that day, though, and after getting through Tompkinsville and Stapleton, I pressed further, into Grymes Hill, West Brighton, Randall Manor, Clove […]

On April 18th, 2010 the first ForgottenTour of the season (39th in the series that began June 1st, 1999 and second in association with the Newtown Historical Society), embarked under partly cloudy and 60-degree conditions, as once again over 40 ForgottenFans and local history enthusiasts converged at the Grand Avenue-Newtown subway station. It turned out to be a 3-hour […]

The Chelsea and Clinton neighborhoods on the west side of Manhattan are relatively easy to get to from lively Little Neck — the train ride to Manhattan is 22 minutes and Penn Station is smack on the edge of each area, both of which run from 7th Avenue to the Hudson River and (generously) from […]

March 2011: Just suffered my first layoff of the decade, which just missed being my third (1999, 2004, 2011). My last trip while employed by someone else in 2011 was to Murray Hill, a rather expensive section of Manhattan your webmaster has no business being in other than as a tourist. Even Murray Hill’s somewhat […]

I have been to Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, the two neighborhoods just to the south of downtown Brooklyn, on numerous occasions, even covering Court Street on one FNY page, and shot Clinton Street in almost its entirety in the summer of 2010 — those photos have yet to be published. I have also covered Columbia Street, another parallel […]

Though most of western Queens can be considered Long Island City (it was once an independent entity) there are subdivisions such as Ravenswood, which faces across the East River across Roosevelt Island to the Upper East Side; Queensbridge, just north and south of the Queensboro Bridge; Hunters Point, the small bit surrounding the mouth of the […]

Helping fulfill a recent self-promise to tour around in places such as upper Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island locales that have so far gotten something of the short end of the stick, FNY-wise, I was in Inwood in upper Manhattan checking out its collection of one-block streets. True, I had already covered little known Manhattan streets […]

I was hunting down an old road in Ozone Park just past the Brooklyn line south of the Liberty Avenue el, and followed it as far as it went. Near the end of the route, I was met by a playground and a street named Centreville, and I was in the midst of a small […]

BY GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent It would have been easy to look through a tour book and write a list of common tourist spots in Harlem and then take pictures of them. Some sites here are culled from research and some are from my personal knowledge. Many places will not even be shown by […]

In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had once been a Queens hotspot, since until 1910 it was the western end of the Long Island Rail Road (ferries carried commuters across the mighty […]

BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor Situated on the edge of the glacial terminal moraine, Kew Gardens offers historic architecture, winding streets, and a village environment. The neighborhood is completely planned out, but has an organic centuries-old feel. A sense of place, a relationship with nature, one that gives residents pride and makes a trip […]

I posted a page of Little Neck in winter last year [2010], and since arctic conditions temporarily took control lof the area in mid-January 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to do it once again, especially since I didn’t have to stray extremely far from Forgotten New York Headquarters to do so. […]

It was a day of crystalline cold in December 2010. The streets were still barren of snow, and no one in NYC yet knew that almost five feet and counting of white and quickly grey matter would soon be mounting in piles and drifts. It had been a good five years since I had set […]

I recently walked from the St. George Ferry in Staten Island through Tompkinsville, Stapleton, and West Brighton, finishing at Clove Lakes Park, and had intended originally to do a Forgotten Walks page on the entire route. I had obtained nearly 250 pictures, though, and time constraints caused me to have to split things up into […]

Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the Post Road to Boston. In the original Commissioners’ Plan drawn up 1807-1811 by surveyor John Randel, Broadway was originally going to run “north” above Tenth […]

Much of the southern Bronx was owned in the colonial era by the Morris family. Richard Morris, originally from Wales, purchased a large estate called Broncksland from a Samuel Edsall in 1670; his grandson, Lewis Morris (1726-1798), served in the Continental Congress from 1775-1777, and in the NY state legislature between 1777 and 1790, and […]

In July 2010 I stumbled in the dead dog heat on West 30th Street (the fruits of that labor are included on West 30th Part 1 and West 30th Part 2) and then turned south on 9th Avenue. 9th Avenue is a northern continuation of Greenwich Street, which ends at a wide plaza formed by […]

In 1901, Auburndale, east of Flushing, Queens, was empty farmland. Enter the New England Development & Improvement Co., which bought the 90-acre Thomas Willets farm, and lo and behold, Auburndale the community was born. The name comes from Auburndale, Massachusetts, the home of L. H. Green, who developed the community starting in 1901, when the Long Island […]

Quite a bit of Queens real estate bears the name Hollis — the neighborhoods Hollis, Holliswood, Hollis Park Gardens and Hollis Hills, the LIRR Hollis station, Hollis Avenue, Hollis Hills Terrace and Hollis Court Boulevard. The name honors a small town in southern New Hampshire with a current population of just over a thousand. […]

BY SERGEY KADINSKY Contributor to Forgotten NY Queens is a borough of many boulevards. Some define the borough, while others stretch for only a few blocks, stubs of once-grand plans that never came to fruition. Astoria’s Berrian Boulevard is one such example. When Queens was mapped out into a uniform grid in the early 1920s, […]

As I had written on an early Forgotten New York page in 2000, NYC has a Main Street in all five boroughs: Manhattan (Roosevelt Island), Brooklyn (DUMBO), The Bronx (Edgewater Village), Staten Island (Tottenville) and Queens, in Flushing and Kew Gardens Hills. Though none of NYC’s Main Streets are renowned in history or show business, […]

After a re-examination of Bay Ridge’s 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge in Part One, I continued along 3rd Avenue in its mid-section, under the elevated Gowanus Expressway in Sunset Park from 65th Street north to the Prospect Expressway, where some of 3rd Avenue seamlessly becomes Hamilton Avenue and the rest continues along to downtown Brooklyn. […]

Three boroughs have a major road called 3rd Avenue: Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue runs from Cooper Square north to the Harlem River and officially extends into the Bronx as Third Avenue (it was so named when the elevated train was extended into the Bronx in the 1880s). The Bronx even has a second 3rd Avenue in […]

One evening in July I had just gotten out of the dentist in downtown Brooklyn — and I am going in and getting out of oral surgeons’ and dentists’ offices a great deal this year; a high starch diet for over 50 years will do that — when I decided to take a walk down […]

This sign reminded me of something: I do most of my Forgottening by myself, though I do tours that have accommodated between 30 and 60 people. (I’m not much use as a party guest, as I’m not effective in big crowds where I have nothing special to do.) I have few vices, but one of […]

A few weeks after exploring the southern reaches of Woodside on ForgottenTour 40, the Newtown Historical Society and FNY turned north and dissected historical territory on Tour 42 (there was an intermission in Bushwick on Tour 41). Woodside, a bustling community centered at Roosevelt Avenue and 61st Street, was originally a part of Newtown, a larger colonial village. It […]

Forgotten New York is sometimes like the NFL. (Stick with me.) The NFL is divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, which in turn are divided into three divisions. Your team plays the teams in its own division twice per season, and it plays the rest against teams from your own conference and […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Back in June [2010] I was dazedly puttering around the Middletown and Pelham Bay neighborhoods in the northeast Bronx, the kinds of New York City areas the AAA Guide or Time Out New York choose to ignore. Yet, thousands of people live and work there and these neighborhoods have their own […]

Though the hot sweltering Sunday, June 27, 2010 weather kept a number of tourgoers away (by apparent contract with the Almighty, ForgottenTours are never held in sunny, brisk, cool weather) 30 diehards still made it to Bushwick, Brooklyn for the 41st tour in a sequence that began June 1st, 1999 — on a nearby thoroughfare, Brooklyn’s […]

In June 2010 there was a near riot in the normally crowded, but placid South Street Seaport when a Canadian rapper called Drake (whether he is the next Jay-Z or Diddy or whatever is yet to be determined; he has been anointed as the next big thing) and the Hanson Brothers (the blond pop stars, […]

BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten New York contributor Hunters Point has been visited before quite a few times by Forgotten-NY, but like a good book, every time you read it, you always find something new in the story. With the redevelopment of Hunters Point South on the fast track to completion, we take one more look to the […]

The sky was angry that day, 6/6/10, my friends, for ForgottenTour 40, the third tour under the auspices of the Newtown Historical Society, and there were even doubts that the tour would take place that day or finish, if it did start. We did get the tour started, though, and finished it with a minimum of tempestuousness. […]

Sometimes, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. Or Boston. Or even Albany, Newark or Jersey City. I’ll explain. Manhattan, once you get north of 14th Street, just doesn’t have the sheer number of dead-ends or one-block alleys block by block that other northeast cities have. Philadelphia has a main network grid of streets — numbered north and […]

I visited mid-Staten Island in mid-February, a place where the NYC guidebook writers and trend seekers never visit. I was reminded about the limitations of winter photography; though it was reasonably bright, with a high cloud cover, the shadows were dark and plentiful and so I had to do more doctoring than usual, fiddling with […]

I was lurching about Lower Manhattan on a May 2010 Saturday, completing my FNY self-imposed assignment — to locate every possible overlooked, forgotten-about and uncared-for detail in sight, photograph it, upload into my computer, prepare them for the internet (they’re always too large), research them, and assemble a page about them, which is viewed by […]

Despite having both its east and west ends chopped off in various bouts of urban renewal, Duane Street abides nicely. When it was first laid out around 1800, give or take a few years before or after, Duane Street ran from the confluence of New Chambers and Chatham Streets, curving nothwest and then running west […]

ABOVE: BILLOPP/CONFERENCE HOUSE, Conference House Park Although officially, New York City is the southernmost town in New York State, Tottenville, on the southern end of Staten Island, was actually the southernmost village when it was a part of Westfield Township when Staten Island was an independent county prior to 1898. The house shown above, constructed […]

Continuing my Tottenville perambulation documented in Part One, I followed Amboy Road to Connecticut, then right on Shore Road, which ends at Satterlee Street with this house, the Biddle Mansion, in view. Google Map: Tottenville Part 2 Captain Henry Hogg Biddle’s grand mansion at 70 Satterlee Street was built on the water’s edge […]

A quick look at a map of southeastern Brooklyn reveals a nearly unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony, as city planners slavishly copied the Manhattan grid here and in most of Brooklyn. We’re in, or near, the old Kings County town of Flatlands, which describes things nearly perfectly — making the terrain ripe for a gridiron development. Hilly […]

The Astoria el, which runs up 31st Street from Queens Plaza to just short of Ditmars Boulevard and carries the N train and the soon to be retired W (the Q will take its place, I’m told), alternates between a busy, bustling neighborhood mecca with newsstands and restaurants and a forbidding demimonde of the detritus of […]

The western Bronx consists of a chain of high hills and valleys arrayed on the eastern banks of the Harlem River, heavily urbanized now, but formerly home to wealthy estates and thickly wooded meadows where you wouldn’t be surprised to hear ‘tally-ho’ as the hounds pursued hapless foxes, and horse-drawn carriages traveled the rare cobblestoned […]

As I mentioned at on FNY’s Midwood slice, “southeastern Brooklyn reveals an unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony.” Still, between about 1968 (when I first jumped on a bike and began exploring Brooklyn from my Bay Ridge home) and 1993, when I moved to fab Flushing, it was MY unbroken grid, and I fully employed it […]

So today, FNY is concluding its Myrtle Avenue survey, covering the five miles the road spans between downtown Brooklyn and Richmond Hill. I often walk NYC’s lengthy avenues from beginning to end, since I enjoy the contrasts along the way. In 1999 my first such walk was the length of the Bronx’ Grand Concourse — […]

Continuing FNY’s Myrtle Avenue walk this week we rather abruptly cross into Queens and two relatively stable, peaceful neighborhoods, Ridgewood and Glendale. If you look at a map of Brooklyn and Queens, two major roads travel from western Brooklyn on almost a straight line (with a couple of gentle zigs and zags here and there) […]

I hadn’t walked a considerable length of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn since 1965. That year I distinctly remember some aspects of a walk my mother and I took down Myrtle, one of the lengthiest avenues in Brooklyn and Queens. In those days, and right on into the 1980s, a walk down Myrtle was a somewhat […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Today’s Myrtle Avenue walk extends from the leftover unused el section from Lewis Avenue east to the Madison Theatre, just past the point where the remaining active section of the Myrtle el turns off on Palmetto Street. Myrtle Avenue was laid out as a tolled plank road from Broadway east to […]

On the second leg of my quick Bensonhurst trip, I wandered down 84th Street into the heart of ancient New Utrecht. Brooklyn, now co-terminous with Kings County, was once just one, albeit the most important, of six towns that made up Kings County, delineated by British rulers in 1683. “KIngs” refers to the Restoration British monarch at the time, King […]

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for 35 years, the last time in 1993 when I gravitated to Queens. I now live on the borderline of Queens and Nassau County. I work in Nassau and have many friends in Nassau; yet, since I do not have a drivers’ license, I’ll never be of Nassau, unless that situation changes. […]

In September 2008 I took a ride up north … about as far north as you can go in Manhattan and still be on Manhattan Island. Because every rule has an exception, there is a piece of Manhattan actually on the mainland, Marble Hill (although it technically had beenon the island, then was an island […]

Having rambled through New Brighton in Staten Island a week previously, it’s time now to turn Forgotten attention to New York’s other “Brighton” named for the famed British Channel-side resort, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Civil War profiteer William Engeman was the first to develop the oceanside territory between today’s Ocean Parkway and Sheepshead Bay, purchasing lots […]

I know Brighton, England, only from the 1979 movie Quadrophenia, where it was depicted as the seaside resort town in southern England in which Phil Daniels as Jimmy is horrified to discover that his Mod idol, the Ace Face, played by Sting, works as a bellboy. It’s also the place where the Mods and Rockers […]

Bank windows at Maspeth Federal Savings Bank at Grand Avenue and 69th Street are featuring the very first Newtown Historical Society exhibit, A Walk Down Flushing Avenue in 1929. The exhibit runs December 21, 2009 through February 27, 2010. New York in the 1920s and 1930s is surprisingly well-documented and archived — the City photographed […]

After reaching Graham Avenue after duly noting the Gothic Most Holy Trinity/St. Mary’s Church and its satellite buildings after proceeding south on Manhattan Avenue, I turned north up Graham. The avenue runs from Flushing Avenue, where it meets Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard (a.k.a. Sumner Avenue) north to Driggs Avenue and McGuiness Boulevard. Graham Avenue […]

A few weeks after my trip to Far East Williamsburg, I had a hankering for roughly the same territory, but this time, a little further west, where there is somewhat more of a human presence. I settled on walking down Manhattan Avenue and up Graham, in what is mostly east Williamsburg, though not far east, […]

The name Boerum pops up a couple of times in the Brooklyn gazzeteer (a map, for those of you in … ah, I won’t finish that joke, I’ll get in trouble). As with so many other somewhat foreign-sounding names in NYC, it commemorates a Dutch colonial family: Willem Jacobse Van Boerum immigrated to New Amsterdam […]

You’ve all heard of DUMBO, the formerly forbidding part of Brooklyn that’s Down Under The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. The Mother Borough also has its own area between the bridges, and, with apologies to the venerable typefont, I have dubbed it BEMBO, or Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. Original, I know. Manhattan’s area between […]

In a borough that ruthlessly changed most of its street names to numbers beginning in the 1910s (beginning in Woodhaven, actually) there are, interestingly, still pockets of streets named in alphabetical order scattered throughout. There’s Elmhurst (Aske through Macnish); East Elmhurst (Butler through Humphreys); Rego Park (Asquith Crescent through Fitchett Street); Forest Hills (Austin through […]

It’s one of the longest-tenured abandoned buildings in a borough full of them — see parts of Seaview Hospital, the Staten Island Farm Colony, and the St. Augustine Retreat House (into which neither your webmaster or any of my scouts have ventured into yet, at least to obtain decent photos). The castellated, turreted S.R. Smith Infirmary, later the […]

When I first began doing FNY in 1998 one of my original shoots was in Vinegar Hill, an improbably isolated swatch of Brooklyn found by heading east on one of the DUMBO east-west streets all the way until there’s no further to go. The brick warehouses, powerhouses and light manufacturing that make up the eastern […]

Port Richmond, a town on Staten Island’s north shore about 2-3 miles west of the St. George Ferry, has been a frequent destination for me over the years and has been touched on in Forgotten NY frequently. I first visited in the mid-1960s when the R-7, now the S-53, bus line that runs from Bay […]

If it seems as if I am revisiting a lot of areas I have previously covered this year [2009] that’s true. Many of my neighborhood profiles were done early on just after I instituted Forgotten NY back in 1999, and in NYC some areas never change much and others change at warp speed. Some areas I […]

I’ve done an East Williamsburg page before. However, I’ve been prevailed upon by Miss Heather and others that I was incorrect. She maintains that my East Williamsburg page was really southeast Greenpoint. I defer to Miss Heather in these matters. She is an area resident and what’s more, she has won the 2009 Village Voice […]

So, what were 32 ForgottenFans doing gathered around a fenced rock in soggy Ridgewood on an October 2009 Saturday? They were standing alongside the marker that divided the ancient towns of Bushwick and Newtown, or so the story goes. In the first (to my recollection) ForgottenTour that spanned two boroughs, Forgotteners gathered at the Jefferson Street station on the […]

Riverdale, in the northwest Bronx between approximately West 246th Street on the south, the Yonkers city line on the north, the Henry Hudson Parkway and Riverdale Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west (and by the communities of North and South Riverdale) is one of the city’s most piquant, and most […]

The Newtown Historical Society, in conjunction with The Newtown Pippin Project, identified 3 locations at which to plant historic Newtown Pippin apple trees, bringing the fruit back to its place of origin. The fruit trees were planted today at Maspeth Federal Savings, the Middle Village 75th Street Block Association’s community garden and at Ridgewood’sOnderdonk House. The […]

I became so enamoured of the Van Cortlandt Village/Kingsbridge Heights area while doing ForgottenTour 37 around the (temporarily dry) Jerome Park Reservoir that I resolved to return and explore these two obscure Bronx enclaves a little more in-depth, and that’s exactly what I did on September 20, 2009. There’s no clear boundary between the two […]

Has it really been ten years since I did my first survey of Gravesend in Brooklyn for Forgotten NY? It has been, and although ForgottenTour 33 explored Gravesend in 2008 I really haven’t been back to give it real justice. Now that local historian Joseph Ditta’s new book Gravesend Then and Now has hit the shelves, […]

I was at West 14th and 8th Avenue the other day when I decided to walk Bleecker Street from 8th Avenue all the way east to the Bowery, its entire length. Only two east-west streets can be said to extend from the West to the East Village — Bleecker does so, along with West 4th. […]

In 2005 FNY did a 2-part survey of Queens Boulevard, a borough aorta running from Queens Plaza, the landing point of the Queensboro Bridge, all the way to Jamaica. Looking at that page again, I gave its liveliest stretch surrounding the elevated viaduct in Sunnyside short shrift. I hope to alleviate that with today’s page. […]

I love els. From Brooklyn’s New Utrecht Ave., Livonia Avenue, Broadway of Brooklyn (Manhattan’s Broadway is elled too) to Queens’ Liberty and Jamaica Avenues, Roosevelt Avenue and Queens Boulevard (that el is all shot and ready to go on a future piece) despite the noise and crowds, els hold a fascination for me…Forgotten artifacts seem […]

Has it been two years since I began my Bedford Avenue survey with a walk along its entire length from Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay north to its beginnings at Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint? It doesn’t seem that long, but there it is. This summer I finally completed that walk, in two sections, and I’ll […]

ForgottenTours resumed for the first time since late summer 2008 on August 16, 2009 with a walk around Jerome Park Reservoir, the Bronx’s “Education Row.” Assisting your webmaster on this tour was Brooklyn Daily Eagle managing editor and veteran tour guide (notably for the old Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment) Raanan Geberer (left), whose recollections […]

In October 2008, having finished my survey of St. Paul’s Avenue in Staten Island, I decided to further explore the high hill behind it. A line of very high hills in succession, Fort Hill, Ward’s, Grymes, Emerson, and Todt Hill, form a sort of spine down the center of the island; those who don’t believe […]

The interesting thing is, Linden Place begins extraordinarily promisingly — as you begin at Northern Boulevard, you find yourself at several centuries-old landmarks that have somehow, somehow survived in Flushing despite its relentless overurbanization over the decades. The moment you start walking north on Linden Place, though, you quickly find yourself in what can alternately […]

Continued From Part 1 Ditmars Boulevard is interrupted for a couple of blocks between 82nd and 86th Streets, partly a consequence of the construction of LaGuardia, né Glenn Curtiss Airport, in the early 1930s. 23rd Avenue (left) skirts the southern boundary of the airport for a couple of blocks and is lit by dwarf […]

The name Ditmars, or Ditmas, appears more than once in the NYC street directory. The Bronx has a Ditmars Street in City Island, there’s a Ditmas Avenue in Kensington, namesake Ditmas Park and Brownsville, Brooklyn; and here in Astoria, Ditmars Boulevard, named in honor of Abram Ditmars, first mayor of Long Island City, NY who […]

There’s a conclave of sorts in Crown Heights, where St. John’s, St. Charles and St. Francis Places all come together just west of Bedford Avenue. Running from 5th Avenue and Douglass Street east to 8th and Flatbush Avenues, and again from Plaza Street at Grand Army Plaza to East New York Avenue, St. John’s Place and its […]

The shoreline of Manhattan is almost entirely encircled by parks and bike trails. Likewise, the Brooklyn shoreline is also receiving more park space. In contrast, the decaying industrial shoreline of the College Point peninsula remains largely off-limits to the general public, with few parks on the water’s edge. The peninsula is bounded by the Flushing […]

In 2007 I visited Queens Plaza, the gateway to Long Island where the #7 and BMT N trains converge (though both issue from Times Square) and incredibly bad architecture, strip clubs, and formerly formidable buildings that are now down on their luck all come together. Things have changed somewhat — the parking garage determined (and […]

Brooklyn’s Court Street, named for the courthouse buildings downtown, runs from Montague Street and Cadman Plaza West (which was once Fulton Street and was shadowed by the rumblings of that street’s titular el until 1942) in a straight line to Gowanus Bay in Red Hook. It encompasses the hustle and bustle of downtown, the almost […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Park Avenue When Eva Gabor sang, “Darlin, I love ya but give me Park Avenue” she didn’t mean its lengthy Bronx stretch, which meanders along both sides of the Metro North tracks from the Major Deegan Expressway north to Third (not 3rd) Avenue and East 189th Street. Is has […]

New York City borders on an ocean, several straits and a tidal estuary (the Hudson River). This propitious location has given rise to over 400 bridges, including two of the four remaining rectractile bridges in the USA (Carroll Street in Brooklyn and Borden Avenue in Queens); High Bridge, the oldest bridge over the Harlem, favored […]

Comes the word this week (May 4, 2009) that one more butcher is leaving the Meatpacking District… as the NY Post ran it, according to Pat LaFrieda, “A lot of people would like to see us out of here. We don’t fit no more.” Most of the butchers have moved to more welcoming territory in New Jersey and upstate […]

Since 1973, Mount Morris Park, located along Madison Avenue between East 120th and East 123rd Streets (it interrupts the northern progress of Fifth Avenue for 4 blocks) has been known as Marcus Garvey Park. The roadway that forms its western boundary is still called Mount Morris Park West, however, as is the immediate surrounding area […]

In Time Magazine this week (4/26/09) President Obama’s staffers say they think of the White House as a “living museum.” Sometimes things should be frozen right where they are, never to change. Detroit used to employ tens of thousands of people who made the best cars on the planet. The New York City waterfront used […]

There are entire sections of Brooklyn, probably New York City’s borough that hews most rigidly to the grid concept, that have no cul de sacs or alleys whatsoever; think of Sunset Park, Marine Park or Bensonhurst, which have only a handful between them. When it comes to one-block streets or hidden laneways, I was fortunate to […]

Continued from Page 1 WAYFARING: BAY RIDGE ALLEYS 72nd Court [nggallery id=1868] 72nd Court is a dead-end on 72nd Street just east of Shore Road. Unlike its alley partners in Bay Ridge, it doesn’t have a name, but rather unimaginatively borrows the number of the street where it’s located; perhaps all the permutations of “Bay” and “Ridge” had […]

It was a day as bright and crystal clear as April gets; I had returned home from taking a season ticket holders’ tour of the Mets’ brand-new Citifield. Getting back home around 2:30, it was still pretty early in the day so I went back on the Long Island Rail Road (which is only a […]

“Heaven,” postulated David Byrne, “is a place where nothing ever happens.” “Being just contaminates the void,” Robyn Hitchcock riposted some years later. In that spirit, it’s just possible that the three alleyways shown on today’s ForgottenPage are still here in New York, a town that has gradually sloughed off, paved over and eliminated its alleys over the […]

With so much attention being paid to the city’s shameful land grab that threatens to put the businesses of Willets Point, the “Iron Triangle” of Queens, out of business, I thought it would be appropriate to show you a much larger ‘iron triangle’ just across the East River in the Bronx, Hunt’s Point, where auto glass, auto parts, light industry […]

Believe it or not Forgotten NY does get complaints. Well, one or two once in awhile. Many of them concern FNY’s stuck-in-1999 design. To your webmaster, RSS sounds like an auto parts store and twitter is what birds do. Others complain about underrepresentation of some neighborhoods. I will plead guilty in this — in ten […]

guest post by DON GILLIGAN On March 1, 1932, 77 years ago (in 2009), at about 9:00 PM, someone placed a homemade ladder against the wall of the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, NJ and set in motion a series of events that would culminate three years later in a trial that journalist H. L. Mencken would call, with […]

As a Bay Ridge boy I made frequent trips by bus to Staten Island after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in November 1964. What was then the R7 (now the S53) ran from 95th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn to what was then Staten Island’s retail hotbed, Richmond Avenue in Port Richmond. And so, […]

There are New Yorkers who have never set foot in Staten Island, and there are New Yorkers who are shocked to hear that there are people who don’t live there who have. In fact the most frequent amount of time spent by some New Yorkers is the time they spend accompanying friends are relatives from out of […]

Staten Island’s surviving Broadway is one of the main north-south streets of West New Brighton, running from Clove Road at St. Peter’s Cemetery generally north to Richmond Terrace. I say “surviving” because Staten Island has had a number of Broadways over the years, as this list by historian Steve Morse attests: there have also been […]

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Past and present fast food The Orange Hut at Broadway and 54th Street still carries the outlines and contours of its former life as a White Tower hamburger chain restaurant. The last White Tower closed in Toledo, OH in June 2008; the chain originated in 1926, its origins detailed in a […]

Continuing my fascination with NYC’s non-Manhattan Broadways, which begain in June 1999 with my very first ForgottenTour on Brooklyn’s Broadway, continued on several Forgotten NY pages there, and then continued further on the Bronx’ Broadway in late 2008, I hiked Queens’ very own Broadway in December 2008 and Jaunary 2009. The route begins in Ravenswood […]

Because of its proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, I had always thought Ozone Park’s name had something to do with air travel, since the ozone layer is high in earth’s atmosphere. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When developers Benjamin Hitchcock and Charles Denton built lots of small houses immediately south of Woodhaven in […]

Continued from Part 2 Metropolitan Forgive the blur on the image above: it was blown up from a smaller picture I obtained in 2005 on a previous walk. This is Metropolitan Avenue looking east. Some structures in the photo have been torn down, and new construction has appeared elswhere on the street. Metropolitan Avenue runs […]

Continued from Page 1 Con Dead Time has proven the enemy for our magnificent brick power plants in recent years. The Long Island City Penn Station powerhouse, with its four iconic smokestacks, has been converted to residential use, minus the smokestacks, and the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT) powerhouse on 500 Kent and Division Avenues, shown […]

Kent Avenue runs from the eastern end of Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border. Because of Brooklyn’s topography along the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Wallabout Channel and the East River, the route resembles a giant question mark in reverse without the dot. It’s unusual among Williamsburg’s north-south avenues like Wythe Avenue, Berry Street, and Driggs Avenue […]

Jamaica Hills has to be one of the smallest neighborhoods I have profiled on FNY. It spans just a few square miles between Grand Central Parkway on the north, Hillside Avenue on the south, Parsons Boulevard on the west, and Homelawn Street on the east — a rather compact area. It sits atop the terminal moraine […]

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 End of the Line The northern end of the IRT 7th Avenue line, the West 242nd Street Station, serves the #1 local. An unfortunate quirk of the 7th Avenue IRT is the fact that it is all local above the 96th Street station. The situation is alleviated somewhat by wide spacing […]

There’s been a Van Zandt Avenue in Douglaston, my old maps tell me, since 1910 or so, perhaps before that. The street is named for an early area settler, Wynant Van Zandt, whose ca. 1825 dwelling, now the Douglaston Club, still stands on Douglaston Parkway north of the railroad. I was roving through Little Neck and Douglaston a […]

“Bergen” comes up frequently on the Brooklyn map — there’s Bergen Street, which runs from Cobble Hill to Brownsville, Bergen Beach playground, Bergen Triangle and Bergen Avenue. The neighborhood, which is delineated by Ralph Avenue on the west, Paerdegat Basin on the north and east, Avenue U, East Mill Basin and the Belt Parkway, was […]

I recently got an angry note from a ForgottenFan that, as far as I understood it, excoriated me for not yet making it down to Gerritsen Beach for a FNY page. Fear not, with a few days off coming up during the holidays (recent losses have chastened me into doing a Staycation™ this holiday season) […]

The confluence of decent weather and a ForgottenTour has been rare indeed. There was one string of about 9 or 10 Tours over a couple of years that featured uniformly overcast weather if not showers as well. All that changed for Tour 36 in Prospect Park on October 26, 2008. October usually features my favorite weather […]

I was in Rosebank, Staten Island in October 2008 to photograph the mighty Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (which I did, but it deserves its own Forgotten New York page that will appear presently) and, having a couple of hours to kill before meeting a friend atKillmeyer’s in Kreischerville, decided to hike around […]

You might think San Francisco and Flushing have absolutely nothing in common, but they do share something. Way over in the extreme western end of Flushing, between College Point Boulevard, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Railroad and the Kissena Park Corridor, there’s a cluster of small streets unnoticed except by their residents and the people […]

Well, hello, yourself. I’ll get it out of the way right here: your webmaster is, of course, the world’s oldest Boy Scout (I performed not one but two good deeds while in San Francisco in August 2008: tracked down the owner of a found cell phone, and returned a comb that fell from a woman’s […]

BY ALEXIS BUISSON Guest FNY columnist Describing the “Iron Triangle” other than “a place you would never go to otherwise than compelled to do so” would not be an overstatement. This small, smelly and noisy triangular neighborhood in Queens is home to warehouses, car repair and auto parts stores, and, they say, only one resident. In […]

In January 2008 I was perusing an old Hagstrom map (yes, I do that for fun). The old Hagstrom, before the company digitized the entire NYC map, preserved some archaisms and oddities that are often worth investigation. For example, in the Bronx (either in Allerton or Bronxdale; it’s on the borderline) at Mace and Bronxwood, […]

Continued from Part 1 Though its exterior has been renovated in recent years, heavy on the aluminum siding, Grace Church (now known as Church At The Rock) on East 92nd Street just south of Avenue J, is a Canarsie touchstone and a beloved local landmark. The Methodist Protestant Church of Canarsie, since renamed Grace, was founded […]

I know that some cynics might think that I’m being facetious with that title card, but Canarsie and your webmaster are old pals. I was a frequent visitor to this southeastern Brooklyn neighborhood between 1974, when I first rode a bicycle from Bay Ridge, until 1993 when I moved to fab Flushing and my jaunts became […]

Forgotten Fans gather at two Type C 1910-vintage lamps flanking entrance of 1 Hanover Square downtown Well, your webmaster is never gonna get rich writing about lampposts, taking pictures of lampposts, or leading lamppost tours. This was the most sparsely attended ForgottenTour since Tour #4 in St. George, Staten Island, November 1999 — 3 people were on that one, […]

My relationship with Bayside, Queens has been an ambivalent one: I have worked here (albeit anywhere from one to three days a week, at the Bayside Times newspaper chain) since 1996, yet I’ve always resisted it as far as Forgotten New York is concerned since it all seemed rather…boring, but in a beautiful way; it […]

Your webmaster has a history with the Manhattan Bridge — much more than the Brooklyn, as it turns out. As a kid I lived along the BMT 4th Avenue line, the R (local) and N (express) with the West End (then, the B) crashing the party at the 36th Street station, and (what was then) the […]

Roving FNY correspondent Gary Fonville has come up with yet another big catch of faded advertisements throughout the five boroughs. LEFT: This ancient relic was meant to be seen from the old 6th Avenue el and the street. Unfortunately, FNY’s camera could not get a better angle on this unintelligible sign. This as in all likelihood predates […]

FNY has spent too little time in the Bronx over the years — without making excuses, it’s a ways from Flushing and Little Neck. I do have a backlog of Bronx scenes, though. Here’s some views from Bedford Park that I snagged at the peak of fall color in late October 2006 (and the winter […]

Your webmaster will admit it: I haven’t bought a CD in a couple of years, though I still have a CD collection numbering about 400 and an LP collection of approximately 250-300, and I still play a lot of them regularly. The past couple of years, though, 99% of my music buys have been online […]

Continued from West Broadway Part 2 West Broadway and Grand Street. Once north of Canal Street, West Broadway enters Soho (no longer below Canal but now south of Houston) and changes character completely, becoming the main shopping and restaurant strip in a neighborhood jampacked with them… Prior to about 1840 the stretch of West Broadway between Canal […]

Continued from West Broadway Part 1 Here’s the scene on West Broadway between Duane and Thomas Streets. All the buildings are from 1860-1875, and two have “Easter eggs” that give clues about them. “Standard Scale & Supply Co.” former business 1871, date of construction. With a 6-star shield; one star has fallen off. Duane Street east […]

Those who live in or who’ve been to Atlanta say that an inordinate amount of streets are called Peachtree; in Manhattan, meanwhile, there are 6 streets called Broadway, and all five boroughs, for that matter, have a Broadway. In NYC, all Broadways are a hommage to the original that begins at Bowling Green and runs […]

Continued from Highland Park, Part 1 Turning the corner on to the vestigal path known as Robert Place and striding back to Highland Boulevard, we find an answer familar to all Nick Cave fans, and numerous others: God is in the house. This facility is home to the Discalced (i.e., barefoot or with just sandals) Carmelite Sisters. According to […]

By BRIAN BERGER whowalkinBrooklyn.com In the world of lesser-known Brooklyn neighborhoods, none is more obscure, or more mysterious, than Highland Park. This is partly the result of geography, nestled as it is in the borough’s northeast corner and partly bad luck: nobody famous enough to represent the area’s hills and history has come from Highland […]

While it seems at times that Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are dominated by unimaginative street names… numbers, letters… in actuality vast swaths in all 4 boroughs are still dominated by streets named for real people. I had always been under the impression that Stockholm Street in Bushwick and Ridgewood was so named in honor of a […]

Al Deppe’s, the former Staten Island hot-dog slinger, wasn’t exactly a Tail O’ The Pup, the world-famous wiener-shaped West Hollywood, CA hot-doggery (that sadly was forced to shut down in 2005 when its lease wasn’t renewed) but it was a Staten Island touchstone for decades. Restaurateur Deppe (the Graniteville thoroughfare Deppe Place may or may not be named […]

ForgottenFans at Lady Moody House, Gravesend Neck Road, Gravesend, Brooklyn April 20, 2008: With a turnout that rivalled FNY’s most-attended tour, Brooklyn Between the Bridges in October 2003, over 50 ForgottenFans turned out on an overcast day with drizzle expected (after an extraordinary run of good weather for early ForgottenTours, clouds and rain have become an inevitability the […]

4/12/08: a couple of weeks ago FNY walked East 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets in the East Village, and your webmaster had promised a look at East 6th and 7th Streets, which I had also photographed that day. Circumstances intervened, though, and I convened an emergency session of ForgottenFans to descend on the Cheyenne Diner […]

March 2008: Believe it or not we’re beginning to consider Forgotten NY in terms of decades. Your webmaster first conceived of FNY in 1998 and did a lot of principal photography that year (I’ve discarded much of that work because I was just starting out then, had no photography experience, and a good deal of it […]

I was at my dentist on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 for the first time in three years, and found I had chalked up 4 cavities. I mention this because some of my most fruitful ForgottenTrips have been made after a trip to the dentist. I had to make an emergency visit with a toothache on Christmas […]

University Heights, Bronx, is named for a university that is no longer there; Bronx Community College moved into New York University’s spacious campus, and its collection of historic buildings, some by famed late 19th Century architect Stanford White, beginning in 1973. Generally speaking, University Heights is bordered by Burnside Avenue on the south, Fordham Road on […]

Whitestone Bridge from The Boulevard, Malba According to legend, Whitestone takes its name from a large offshore rock where tides from the East River and Long Island Sound met; in other accounts the name is in honor of the White Stone Chapel, erected by townsman Samuel Leggett in 1837. For a time, Whitestone was known as […]

Lucky thing Forgotten NY has a deep bench — on Saturday, January 19, 2008 I walked Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Central Park, obtaining pictures for an upcoming page. When I got home I hooked up the camera to the computer, and my images appeared in the window of the program I use to […]

Getting to Staten Island from Little Neck isn’t easy. Oh, the logistics of it are straightforward enough. (Bear in mind I don’t drive.) Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station; since the IRT South Ferry station isn’t open weekends (at this writing, January 2008), walk a block to 6th Avenue, board BMT “R” train, exit at […]

FNY returns to Astoria Village this week: my third page here. It’s a region the Historic Districts Council calls a “neighborhood at risk” due to the accelerating rate of teardowns and new construction. It’s a neighborhood that, despite its stock of antebellum mansions and single-family homes, has steadfastly resisted any effort at preservation — and is paying the esthetic costs […]

Continuing my exploration of the neighborhood my parents warned me against as a kid due to the presence of “bad boys”, this time we’ll stick a bit closer to the water at the bottom of the slope (the same hill that gives its name to both Bay Ridge and Sunset Park), as well as look at a […]

An explanation for the title, I suppose, is in order. Your webmaster has been a NYC explorer since boyhood; I used to make my parents or grandmother take me on bus rides all over Brooklyn in the early to mid-60s, all the local lines in Bay Ridge, the B16 down Fort Hamilton Parkway and 13th Avenue; […]

A few months ago FNY took you on a tour of the eastern end of Jamaica Avenue in Floral Park and Bellerose, the part that was recently renamed Jericho Turnpike to match its Nassau and Suffolk County extension. This week, we’ll take a journey down Jamaica Avenue’s western end, that rides along the south end […]

Back in the infancy of Forgotten NY, April of 2000 to be exact, I was working at one of those jobs that only required me to be present 3 or 4 times a week (which is great for gathering Forgotten material but not so good when trying to pay bills) and, after a few weeks poking […]

CONTINUED FROM CREAKY ALLEYS PART 1 Before testing our courage and skulking around some more of lower Manhattan’s rare extant alleys, I thought we should pay tribute to a pair that are no longer with us…. Caroline Street was a short lane running from Duane north to Jay between West and Washington. It was eliminated […]

Your webmaster recently went prowling about lower Manhattan, re-shooting the little-known laneways and alleys of the island’s underbelly. It wasn’t so much an attempt to revisit old ground–though admittedly, the first time I photographed these alleys, back in 1999, I was more of a photography amateur than I am now, and the results were rather […]

I must admit…the subhead on this week’s title card is a little bit facile; after all, other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Midwood, East Flatbush, Flatbush, and even Brownsville can be called Brooklyn’s “heartland” since they are well within the central area of Brooklyn. While embarking on exploring the neighborhoods of southwest Brooklyn for Forgottenana, including […]

Is walking the best way for your webmaster to get around in NYC? I think so. When in a car or bus, whatever interests me goes by in a hurry; all I can do is make a mental note or jot it down on scrap paper. On a bike, I tend to concentrate so much […]

September 16, 2007 actually dawned sunny and bright–extremely unusual conditions for a ForgottenTour. When things got started the atmosphere came to its senses and dark clouds rolled in to cover an unusually cool day for September in NYC with the temperature not budging higher than 65 degrees. ForgottenFans welcomed the change, though, after the usual lengthy […]

I’ve been to Little Neckon a street with three names and as you can see, it was good to be out on a day without rain… Believe it or not, the little road, which runs from Douglas Manor through Udall’s Cove to Little Neck Parkway, is one of only two streets in northern Little Neck and […]

Your webmaster would have to say that October, and even November, are my favorite times of year for picture taking. For one thing, those months contain my favorite weather, with a lot of days clear and cool, jacket weather in the 50s and 60s, until mid-November that is, when the weather in NYC becomes drizzle and […]

Hunters Point is a community in Queens on the edge — in more ways than one. It sits on the extreme western edge of the borough, just across Newtown Creek from Greenpoint (mystifyingly, both pedestrian crossings to Brooklyn were severed in the middle of the 20th Century) and can be said to be on the edge […]

Corridor parks…long, narrow strips of green that go on for block after block between two streets, are relatively rare in NYC. The Bronx has two lengthy ones on either side of Mosholu and Pelham Parkways, Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing and Fresh Meadows, and perhaps even Eastern and Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn can come under […]

Not only does Staten Island never make the NYC guidebooks, there might be parts of Staten Island that even Staten Islanders don’t know about. One of these neighborhoods is Park Hill, nestled along the Grymes foothills just south of Stapleton. Fewer Staten Islanders might remember that Park Hill is the former home of the National […]

There are some neighborhoods in NYC like Williamsburg, Greenpoint and the Lower East Side that are seemingly changing by the hour, if not the minute. There are others that are apparently changing more slowly — if not for the better — like Flushing and Astoria. And then there are the neighborhoods that look exactly the same […]

As little as a dozen years ago [as of 2007] you’d never have thought that Brooklyn would become a rock music mecca. In just the past few years though, Venues like Warsaw, Pete’s Candy Store, Union Pool, Galapagos, Asterisk Art Project, The Lucky Cat, free103point9, Tommy’s Tavern, Uncle Paulie’s, the Glasslands, the Woodser, and the McCarren […]

ForgottenTours have been, for the past year and a half, typically held under threatening skies, but the weather for the scheduled Tour 31 on July 29, 2007 not only threatened, but delivered, forcing a move to the following Sunday, August 5th. It was perhaps the nicest day of the month so far and so, in a […]

Cord Meyer Jr. (1854-1910) was the original developer of Elmhurst and Forest Hills. In 1893 Meyer, a successful banker and lawyer, purchased acreage in what was then called Newtown from British retail magnate Samuel Lord of Lord & Taylor fame and proceeded to lay out a street pattern that still exists today, built utilities and […]

Before the 1820s or so, New York City was pretty much confined to the area south of City Hall and indeed, City Hall was left unfinished on its north side since no one believed the city would ever extend north of that. Manhattan Island was dotted with hamlets and small villages, connected by roads like the […]

What’s the longest street that runs entirely in Brooklyn? It seems there are two candidates: Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue. (Any drivers out there want to decide the matter using their odometers?) Some roads running east-west are pretty lengthy, but they extend all the way to Queens and beyond: Linden Boulevard, Myrtle, Metropolitan, Atlantic, and […]

Anything Can Happen® on a ForgottenTour. There was the time we wound up in the Dominican Day Parade on the Grand Concourse in a downpour and ended up in a bar on Bainbridge Avenue, watching David Cone pitch a perfect game (Tour 2). We bumped into since-disgraced Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin at the Latimer House in Flushing, […]

The Bronx’s Longwood and Hunts Point, heavily residential and, toward the East River, industrial, are remnants of country estates: Longwood Park was an 1870s estate owned by Samuel B. White, and Hunts Point was formerly a collection of country estates owned by the Casanovas, Barrettos, Spoffords, Failes, and other wealthy families, many of whose names now […]

Your webmaster admits to not traveling that often. I don’t have the money, and I don’t know the languages. I’ve never left the Northern Hemisphere, and am unlikely to in the near future. (I did make it to Pittsburgh in March ’07, and plan trips in the USA during the year, but my uncomfortability factor […]

During the existence of Forgotten New York, which began in 1998, we’ve mourned the loss of several of New York’s grand old watering holes such as Flessel’s in College Point, Queens; Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn (seen on FNY’s Fulton Street page); and Niederstein’s (Middle Village). Regretfully the time has now come to say goodbye to another: Charlie’s in Throgs […]

“I’m in the mood for Easter everywhere,”once sang idiosyncratic “Arch-drude” British psychedelicist Julian Cope*, and so was your webmaster as he stormed the Bronx for what must have been the first time in months on April 8, 2007. Unfortunately the weatherman wasn’t, as conditions were rather more reminiscent of Thanksgiving, with a temperature of about 40 […]

Well, your webmaster finally made the team picture after 29 ForgottenTours. Can you spot where I am?* As usual, despite sunny weather predicted all week, ForgottenTour Day turned out cloudy, chance of showers. At least on 2007’s Green-Wood Cemetery tour, I didn’t have any hecklers, like I did on the 2006 tour! 30 ForgottenFans and I investigated […]

On what turned out to be a cool, cloudy 4th of July, 2007 your webmaster invaded one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that seems to have been caught between two more highly-publicized ones: that nebulous region between Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, anchored by the Fulton Mall and known on maps merely as “Downtown Brooklyn.” Roughly speaking, it runs […]

The other day I poked my head in Mary Beth’s office and there, on the wall, was a picture of Liberace. I remarked that Mr. Showmanship was so square, he was cool out the other end. “You’re cool when you do what you do,” I said. “That should be your motto,” said M.B. Your webmaster has a […]

CONTINUED FROM EAST WILLIAMSBURG PART 1 As we’ve seen in East Williamsburg Part 1, the region east of downtown Williamsburg is an intriguing amalgamation of abandoned, crumbling hospitals, dog-crap-littered parks, varied and engaging architecture, and oddly enough, a burgeoning hi-rise condo center. Pressing even further east and north we find even more of an industrial wasteland. Bear […]

Equal parts playground and wilderness, Kissena Park is bordered by Oak Avenue, Kissena Boulevard, 164th Street, and Booth Memorial Avenue (referred to rather comically on the Parks Department website as “Hemstead Turnpike”; the avenue hasn’t been called North Hempstead Turnpike for over 50 years!). Like Waters I have often repaired to my park for surcease from the […]

April 1, 2007, didn’t fool 48 ForgottenFans…second-most ever on a ForgottenTour (the prize goes to the 56 who turned up for Tour 14 in Dumbo, October 2003)…who turned up for FNY’s jaunt through Middle Village and Juniper Park. We were aided by FNY Correspondent Christina, the Queen of Queens, and Bob Holden, President of the Juniper Park Civic Association. […]

As much as any other neighborhood in Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace’s boundaries are rather easily defined: it’s that narrow strip, about 8 or 9 blocks at the widest, between the vast greenswards of Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park. Prospect Park West (which 9th Avenue is inexplicably called here — the stretch doesn’t border the park) is […]

It was a deep and dark December as the song goes, and I had just a couple of hours before I lost the light. I decided to walk the scarp that divides Sunnyside and Woodside, through Sunnyside Gardens, and into Astoria… He’s called the Woodside Doughboy and while there are 9 other figures in NYC, such […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 5 That Totten Town Tottenville can unofficially be called New York State’s southernmost town (officially, New York City is). British naval officer captain Christopher Billopp was its first European settler in 1678, and within a couple of years, had built a stone mansion at the foot of today’s Hylan Boulevard that would figure […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 4 Your webmaster made fitful forays into extreme southwestern Staten Island (the old town of Westfield) in the 1960s (I seem to remember a bus ride with my parents past endless fields of nothing (likely Arthur Kill Road, which still has a lot of empty stretches) and a two-lane roadway (that was probably […]

The boundaries of Woodhaven are a little hard to define–especially the eastern end. It’s south of Forest Park, east of the Brooklyn borough line (Eldert Lane and a number of other streets), and north of Liberty Avenue; but in the east, where does Woodhaven end and Richmond Hill begin? Woodhaven Boulevard seems a bit too […]

Back in the infancy of Forgotten NY, April of 2000 to be exact, I was working at one of those jobs that only required me to be present 3 or 4 times a week (which is great for gathering Forgotten material but not so good when trying to pay bills) and, after a few weeks poking […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 3 Eltingville is the name of a neighborhood on Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City, USA. It is on the island’s South Shore, immediately to the south of Great Kills and north of Annadale. Originally called South Side, and later Seaside, the neighborhood owes its present name to […]

Continued from Part 2 As Beatle Paul would often say, we’d like to carry on now with five more stations of Staten Island Rapid Transit, or Staten Island railway, as it’s called now, as it dawned on the MTA after all these years that it isn’t really all that rapid. Your webmaster has been fascinated with […]

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Saturday, January 27, 2007 – The Staten Island Railway cannot be called an official subway, even though it uses modified subway cars; it only travels through a short stretch of tunnel. It’s not a suburban railroad – Staten Island has been part of New York City since 1898. And it’s certainly not a rural railroad, though you’ll […]

This week I’m doing a different kind of Forgotten New York page in that I’m not presenting any historic obscurities, overlooked neighborhoods, or ignored aspects of NYC physiognomy. No, I’m just going to show my neighborhood — the way I found it when I first moved in, and what it’s becoming. Young Flushing Queens […]

In its October 12-18th, 2006 issue, Time Out New York (which featured a cover story by your webmaster in its September 21-27th issue) presented its 50 Best Blocks of NYC story, with North Portland Avenue between Lafayette and DeKalb Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn coming out the winner. It has spawned a debate in ForgottenLand […]

The title is a little misleading; I’m here to praise Port Richmond, not to eulogize it. It’s just that rapid change seems to be coming to this former ferry and commuter town on Staten Island’s north shore and most of it isn’t good, if you like finely detailed, meticulously crafted architectural highlights. I discovered Port Richmond…briefly…as […]

I have been promising my Bronx Forgotten Fans some new material, and the fulfillment starts now. In fall 2006 I walked through Norwood, a triangle-shaped Bronx neighborhood defined by Woodlawn Cemetery on the north, the New York Botanical Garden on the east, and Mosholu Parkway on the south; Reservoir Oval, delineating a former Williamsbridge Reservoir, approximately […]

CONTINUED FROM WHERE THE STREET HAD NO NAME, PART 1 WAYFARING MAP: FROM DYKER BEACH TO BATH BEACH (open map in a separate window so you can follow my route) Where the Street Had No Name For decades, I’ve been fascinated with the broad, 4-lane route that connects 7th Avenue at Poly Place and Cropsey Avenue at […]

I am sure Forgotten aficionados have noticed that my trips back to “the old country”, i.e. my former neighborhood, Bay Ridge, tend to be nostalgic. I make no apologies. I am an enthusiastic nostalgist: while I sometimes cannot remember what I had for lunch yesterday, I remember who was with me on certain days 20 years […]

In the 80s, Tony Carey sang about “The First Day of Summer,” and I thought since this was the last day of summer, with forecasters saying this is the last 85-degree day for awhile, to seek out Rockaway Park and Rockaway Beach…former Playland and present Irish Riviera. Rockaway, depending on what translation is used, means “sandy place” or “place […]

Tour 26 occurred during an auspicious week in Forgotten NY-land….the release, at long last, of the Forgottenbook and a cover appearance for the site in Time Out New York! No one told the rain gods that weather for the tour was supposed to be sunny and bright, however, so it was under windy, threatening skies that Tour #26 commenced […]

As a neighborhood, Morris Park, located in what’s about the exact center of the Bronx, appears to be one of the borough’s most stable and long-standing, but it’s actually only a few decades old and occupies what used to be a vast racetrack – come airfield -come road racing track; many of NYC’s more “stabler” neighborhoods, […]

ForgottenTour 25, August 6, 2006, was our very first evening tour and went very well despite your webmaster’s same-day ascension and descension of his building’s steps 4 times to clean his apartment and spending six hours on his feet before, during and after the tour. This was ill-advised, since the following day a painful back ailment […]

My first memories of Williamsburg came during ages 14-17, when our high school bowling team (on our way to getting whomped by St. Francis Prep and Xaverian) would pile into a Dodge van and trundle up Kent Avenue on our way to the lanes (in a deserted section of Greenpoint at Humboldt and Moultrie Streets). In […]

While “The Deuce” (as its friends and foes knew West 42nd Street between 6th and 8th Avenues) has become the New 42 (more or less, a stretch of New York City that has become the place that tourists flock, or are herded to, there’s still a remnant, or two, of its former highs and lows to […]

It’s hard to say why, but the definitive history of Flushing has yet to be written. Plenty has been written about Flushing’s rich past centuries ago, with its struggles over religious freedom in its very early days. But very little has been said of what Forgotten NY considers to be the rape of Flushing…the wholesale […]

CONTINUED FROM GREEN-WOOD HEIGHTS PART 1 5th Avenue The stretch of Fifth Avenue along Green-Wood cemetery is by far its quietest, sandwiched between its incredibly bustling areas on either end: Park Slope to the north, and Sunset Park and Bay Ridge to the south. It’s hard for any Brooklynite under 70 to envision it now but this […]

I confess. “Green-Wood Heights” is a name concocted by real-estaters stumped about what to call the area on the NW side of Green-Wood Cemetery between Park Slope and Sunset Park. Some even say that the terms refer only to Prospect Avenue south to 20th Street and from 3rd Avenue southeast to about McDonald Avenue. GOOGLE MAP: […]

1-2-3 skiddoo 123rd Street, for some reason, is the scene for many venerable College Point architectural survivors… Its neighbor at 13-11 123rd is rather less recognizable. It was built by Jacob Salathe, superintendent of College Point’s Openhym Silk Mill. Pretty much all its Eastlake Gothic detail has now been eliminated. College Point by Victor Lederer The grandest of 123rd […]

College Point, excluding Broad Channel (which is on its own eponymous island) and the towns along the Rockaway Peninsula, is the most isolated neighborhood in Queens. It is separated from its closest neighbor, Whitestone, by the Whitestone Expressway and the giant empty field that used to be Flushing Airport, and from Flushing by the expressway […]

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 The Vogt family still occupies the house at 13-17 123rd that forebears built in the 1850s. College Point by Victor Lederer Its neighbor at 13-11 123rd is rather less recognizable. It was built by Jacob Salathe, superintendent of College Point’s Openhym Silk Mill. Pretty much all its Eastlake Gothic detail has now been eliminated. College […]

CONTINUED FROM JACKSON HEIGHTS/EAST ELMHURST PART 1 Name That Plane Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, between Ditmars Blvd., 23rd Avenue and 90th Street, has quite the little collection of planes parked in the back. There have to be some Forgotten Fans that can identify one or two. If you’re in the area, wander over […]

In a borough largely ignored by NYC’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the magnificent garden apartments of Jackson Heights are a happy exception. Today’s Jackson Heights is a neighborhood of handsome six-story co-operative apartments, most of which surround a central garden. They appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, beginning in 1914 when the entire area was not much more […]

Forgotten Fans wave with Minerva In what was undoubtedly the best weather ever for a ForgottenTour (sunny and 68) forty Forgotten fans (and one heckler!) converged on Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a peaceful respite since 1838 as one of the first ‘rural cemteries’ or burial parks in America. Previously burials had been done in churches or in […]

When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on the North Shore in Nassau County, Cow Neck, was named. Only later did I discover that it was named for a fish that can no longer […]

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West numbered streets, which run north and south, separated by Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue, with east-west streets named for letters of the alphabet, A to Z. […]

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built the magnificent Manhattan Beach and Oriental Hotels in the 1870s and 1880s, enterpreneurs filled the gap for people who couldn’t afford anything quite so lavish […]

The Hempstead Swamp once occupied a vast area of land that sits just east of present-day St. John’s Cemetery in Queens. The greater area was first settled in 1653 as ‘Whitepot’ by English and Dutch farmers, including the Remsen, Furman, Springsteen and Morrell families. They found the land good for growing hay, straw, rye, corn, oats […]

A lonely outpost even by Staten Island standards is Travis, a small village of about two thousand at the western end of Victory Boulevard. In the colonial period, it was an important crossing point (New Blazing Star Ferry) over the Arthur Kill to Carteret, New Jersey, from whence horses and carriages could continue on to […]

I have never had even a whiff of that peculiar romance most American men feel about their automobiles. When I was a teenager, my fear and apprehensiveness when attempting to learn to drive baffled and amused my teachers: the driving school instructor as well as my cousin Jim, and soon enough the lessons were shelved as […]

Of course, the far west end of 14th Street isn’t dead; it’s arguably more active than it ever was, with celebrity-bait restaurants, clubs and fashion boutiques. However, with the impending closure of Western Beef on 14th Street, one of the last active links to the neighborhood’s 100 years as a slaughterhouse and meat wholesale center […]

The only thing worse than irrelevance is being perceived to be irrelevant. People, places and institutions can be riding high in April and shot down in May, or, in a wonderful phrase Robyn Hitchcock snuck onto one of his albums, one day, they’re a “number in a drawer.” There’s a little enclave in Queens full of beautiful buildings […]

Editor: Kevin Walsh Photographer and writer, except where noted: Christina Wilkinson The Benjamin Rosenthal Library at Queens College features a distinctive clock tower. Walt Whitman taught school on what would later be the Queens College campus. “Paumanok” was a word used by the Algonquin tribe to describe Long Island. The exact meaning is unclear, although William Wallace Tooker, a 19th-century […]

Known to most as a throwaway line in a Paul Simon song, or where you go for the Lemon Ice King, Corona, the neighborhood between Elmhurst /Jackson Heights and Flushing Meadows Park, has a well-defined history, as FNY correspondent Christina W. will relate… GOOGLE MAP: CORONA Above: sign, 37th Avenue Before the land between Elmhurst and Flushingwas developed […]

NEED ANY MORE proof that New York City is a strange and occasionally confusing place…that it can occasionally baffle anyone looking for common sense in urban planning…or a place that can give urban explorers fits of head scratching? Take a look at Edgemere on the Rockaway peninsula, whose mile after mile of ocean beach front has […]

37 Forgotten fans turned out on a 65-degree November Sunday for ForgottenTour 23 in Roosevelt Island. Unlike last time at South Street Seaport when we were besieged by detours and transit delays, things got off on time and everyone was treated to fine weather and plenty of historic buildings and ruins… Many Forgotteners had never ridden on […]

CONTINUED FROM WOODSIDE, QUEENS PART 1 “WWRL Radio took to the air at midnight on August 26, 1926 at a frequency of 1160 AM. Blue burlap was draped over the walls of the Reuman parlor at 41-30 58th St. in Woodside, Queens, and a transmitter and antenna were installed in the backyard. The Reumans continued to […]

By CHRISTINA WILKINSON IN THE 17th and 18th centuries, the area known today as Woodside was filled with swamps, meadows, ponds and forests. A few colonial roads leading from the area’s waterways were forged through by those on their way to better places. A small number of brave souls decided to settle along the way. They […]

QUIET, suburban Rosedale is clustered along the Queens-Nassau County border, between Laurelton in the west and Valley Stream and Woodmere in the east. When visiting the area a couple of years ago, I was struck not by its architecture, which is mostly 50s and 60s suburban sprawl; I was more impressed with its resemblance to […]

I USUALLY return to my old pages unannounced. If I have something new on a certain subject I usually just drop it in without really notifying anyone; one day, you’re looking at a page, and the next, why there’s been something added. Keeps people coming back again and again. But when I revisited Roosevelt Island six years […]

EDGED as it is between the Russian delis and nightclubs of Brighton Beach, the colonial houses and cemeteries of Gravesend, and the sideshow freaks, kiddie rides and mermaids of Coney Island, West Brighton doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Yet the small area dominated by the Warbasse and Trump Houses has its own collection of relics (besides your webmaster, who […]

SUNNYSIDE extends from the Sunnyside Railroad Yards along Skillman Avenue in the north to the Queens-Midtown Expressway in the south between 30th and about 58th Streets. Originally slower to develop than its immediate neighbors, Long Island City and Astoria, Sunnyside was transformed into a bustling residential neighborhood by the opening of the Queensboro Bridge and then […]

Forgotten Fans pose at the Wavertree, one of the Seaport’s museum ships, built in Southampton, England in 1885. Despite massive subway problems, the presence of the Breast Cancer Walk and the Indian Festival, Tour 22 in the South Street Seaport area went off without a hitch, albeit just a little late. All proceeds from this tour went […]

Forgotten Fans at Kingsland Manor I’M NOT certain if I have ever made peace with living in Flushing. I moved here in 1993, to be closer to a long-gone job, and there always seems to be somewhere I’d rather be. Bay Ridge, where I came from, perhaps. Hoboken. Sunnyside Gardens. Bayside. Riverdale (where I turned down […]

LET ME BE absolutely clear about something: like Johnny Cougar Mellencamp, I feel most comfortable in a small town setting. That’s quite unusual coming from somebody who was born in and who has lived in New York City for over 40years. But it’s not so farfetched when you consider that my old home,Bay Ridge, was very self contained, with […]

By CHRISTINA WILKINSON Forgotten NY correspondent DURING the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch farmers settled Newtown and Bushwick on the western end of Long Island. One of these farmers, Paulus Van Der Ende, built a house in Newtown in 1710. The restored farmhouse is located at the corner of what are today Flushing and Onderdonk […]

YET another of New York City’s longstanding establishments is due for change in the imminent future; in July 2005 the Fulton Fish Market, in existence along either side of South Street in one form or another since 1835, was poised to relocate into a bigger, state of the art facility in Hunts Point, Bronx, joining the massive […]

THE DEATH— ie., the Starbucks® and Disney®zation — of Coney Island as we know it is imminent, if you believe all the glowing press releases we’ve seen in the papers this spring. In the immediate Stillwell Avenue area, along the boardwalk but also along Surf Avenue, the so-called hodgepodge of clam bars, amusement areas and […]

HERE are some NYC neighborhoods I find myself in again, again and again. I never tire of Coney, and I always seem to be in the Long Island City–Astoria area (the theme this year is Queens, which we’re covering from west to east as the year goes on); lower Manhattan and the Lower East Side hold a fascination; and in Staten […]

Remsen House, 27th Avenue and 12th Street, Astoria, destroyed February 2005. The house was built in 1835. DEVELOPERS can be a hateful, despicable bunch. Quite a statement coming from a website that evades controversy like Barry Bonds evading a steroid test. But it’s the truth. I am completely ignorant regarding real estate, the price of land and housing, […]

46th Street and 54th Road I SERIOUSLY doubt that half of any New York City guidebooks even mention the two areas in southwest Queens we’ll visit today, ensconced on either side of Calvary Cemetery just east of Greenpoint, north of Ridgewood and in the middle of exactly nowhere. Surprises, however, can be squeezed from these unknown […]

Greenpoint Savings Bank, Manhattan Avenue and Calyer St. KNOWN as the “garden spot of Brooklyn”, an eponym bestowed by theBrooklyn Eagle many years ago, Greenpoint is Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, separated from Long Island City by Newtown Creek. It is the place where the country’s first ironsided warship, the Monitor, was built, the land of Mae West’s […]

Metropolitan Avenue, 1976 – Photo by Middle Village artist Doug Leblang By CHRISTINA WILKINSON Forgotten NY correspondent THE Williamsburgh-Jamaica Turnpike was completed in 1814 and operated as a toll road between the towns of Williams-burgh in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens, two major centers of trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. By 1820, the part […]

The last of Ravenswood’s farmhouses, seen on the title card, was torn down in the unstoppable name of development in mid-2004. It stood at 31st Drive and 12th Street. NEVERMORE will there be any more farms in Ravenswood, a tight section of western Queens arrayed along the East River between Keyspan’s Big Allis generating plant, just south of the […]

Tour 20 in April 2005 was host to about fifty Forgotten Fans in the land of your webmaster’s upbringing. Expected showers never appeared. This tour was lengthier than most, since Bay Ridge‘s sights are spread out over about 40 blocks, but that just made the rest and the eats after the tour that much better. Our tour […]

TRIBECA— a neighborhood that I prefer to call the Lower West Side, which it was before it became a hipster and yuppie playground –has been raised from the dead in the past 30 years, as Independence Plaza and PS 234 have been constructed atop the former Washington Market. Let’s do a very quick assessment of […]

By CHRISTINA WILKINSON A REMOTE area in western Queens, filled with woods, swamps and freshwater pools, the town of Fresh Ponds was part of the land chartered by the Dutch West India Company in 1642. Cypress Hills Street (formerly ‘Old Fresh Pond Road’), which starts in Brooklyn at its southern end, was the progenitor of present-day […]

WHILE BEGINNING to prepare this week’s foray into irrelevance, I was on the horns of a slight dilemma. I had ventured into one of my favorite parts of town, Long Island City and Hunters Point, on several Sundays this past year, both with Christina as my guide and without, so I had a big backlog of both LIC […]

BOSTON may be known as the “Hub of the Universe” but the south Bronx has its very own Hub where four roads converge: East 149th Street and Willis, Melrose and Third Avenues, while Westchester Avenue begins its journey to Pelham Bay Park just a block to the north. Arrayed along Third is one of the […]

By CHRISTINA WILKINSON Forgotten NY correspondent MOST OF US CAN name famous generals of the American Revolution and the Civil War. But how many of us can name those who served in between? During his time, Winfield Scott was considered by many to be the world’s greatest general. He served in the Army for 53 years, and […]

I can’t stay away from Coney Island for long. There’s just so much left over from the old days…good and bad…that it’s a Forgotten NY treasure trove. Yet, more and more of the old Coney seems to disappear year after year. So, summer after winter, winter after summer, I’m back. Above, Coney had a Playland too, […]

Once again into the breach and this time, 40+ Forgotten Fans assembled at the 145th Street IND concourse on December 12th for our second mass invasion of Harlem, this time to Harlem Heights and City College. In the tradition of two past tours, we had a guest narrator, Forgotten Fan Sergio Kadinsky, handling the tour honors […]

OUR EXPLORATIONS TODAY take us to a hilly, verdant corner of the Bronx that has had many names, yet no one knows precisely what they mean. Spuyten Duyvil is tucked into the corner of the Bronx at the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, first stop beyond Marble Hill, that strange piece of Manhattan that resides on the […]

OUR EXPLORATIONS TODAY take us to a hilly, verdant corner of the Bronx that has had many names, yet no one knows precisely what they mean. Spuyten Duyvil is tucked into the corner of the Bronx at the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, first stop beyond Marble Hill, that strange piece of Manhattan that resides on […]

Revere Sugar Refinery, a Red Hook landmark for decades, was demolished in 2007. “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” SO SAYS Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s 2002 LP Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I thought the lyric was apropos to Red Hook’s situation…after decade after desolate decade, the western Brooklyn neighborhood is now in line to get some high-income spillover […]